Mrs. Earp

By Sara Wheeler

May 31, 2013

The fabled shootout at the O.K. Corral rooted Wyatt Earp deep in the American psyche, or at least in its Western mythology. But Ann Kirschner has cleverly identified a parallel story buried under the debris of history: that of Josephine Marcus, for nearly 50 years Earp’s common-law wife and a valiant frontierswoman in her own right.

Marcus was born in New York in about 1860 to respectable Polish-Jewish immigrant parents who soon moved to San Francisco. At 18, she ran away from home, dreaming of making a life for herself on the stage. And not without reason: she was dark and handsome, and although she was just over five feet tall, she boasted a splendid poitrine. “Her bosoms came in the front door before her body did,” a family friend remarked. Then again, unless she were to walk backward this would surely be hard to avoid.

The young Marcus toured the Arizona Territory with a raggedy troupe, performing “H.M.S. Pinafore,” and in the town of Tombstone, romance bloomed with a debauched deputy sheriff. Enter the gunslinging Wyatt Earp.

Kirschner interprets the violence that took place on Oct. 26, 1881, as, at least in part, the consequence of a love triangle starring Marcus, her paramour (now promoted to full sheriff) and Earp, but the two men were also political rivals, vying for power in the newly created Cochise County. Earp was the only man to emerge unscathed from the gunfight, and he promptly abandoned his common-law wife, Mattie, for Marcus. Mattie turned to prostitution to support herself and later committed suicide — just one of the many facts Marcus concealed when she reinvented her past. Indeed, Kirschner discovered so many lies in her subject’s story that “contradictions piled up like a freeway collision.”

In “Lady at the O.K. Corral,” Kirschner deftly conjures the thrill and squalor of frontier boomtowns and mining camps. Marcus and Earp moved restlessly through Colorado, Texas and Alaska, where Earp built a saloon and organized prizefights. Eventually, the couple came to rest in Los Angeles, where Marcus hoped Hollywood could “deliver the dual advantages of making money and burnishing Wyatt’s image.” From 1883, she used the name Mrs. Earp. She had at least one miscarriage, but never bore a child. “The road ahead was all that mattered,” Kirschner explains. “The horizon was endless, always beckoning her forward.”

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Josephine and Wyatt Earp, with Earpie, at a mining camp in Vidal, Calif., about 1920.CreditArizona Historical Society

According to Kirschner, Marcus craved respectability, but “Wyatt’s world of saloons and gambling and shady ladies pushed her out . . . to the distant margins of a disapproving society.” Earp was a “gambler, pimp and thief,” as well as a killer. He betrayed Marcus regularly. There were periods of riches but longer ones of poverty, not least when Marcus herself lost heavily at cards.

Earp became a celebrity of sorts, his reputation “forever defined by Tombstone and the gunfight at the O.K. Corral.” And Marcus was loyal to the end. In the wake of her lover’s arrest for involvement in a con scheme, she complained that “everything was put onto him just because he was Wyatt Earp.” When he died in 1929, she buried his ashes in a Jewish cemetery and devoted herself to bolstering his reputation, battling to halt the production of movies that placed too much emphasis on his murderous tendencies.

Marcus’s later years were sad, as later years often are: she grew increasingly paranoid, careered in and out of litigation and managed, in the end, to alienate even well-wishers. By 1944, the year she died at about the age of 84, she owed money all over Los Angeles. “While her passing was noted in some of the places where she and Wyatt had lived,” Kirschner reports, “there was none of the outpouring of affection or reflection that accompanied Wyatt’s death.”

Kirschner has gained access to many of her subject’s letters and has combed through the layers of Marcus’s mendacious memoir. (Marcus never, for example, admitted her role in the romantic triangle behind the O.K. Corral.) But although Kirschner is a solid researcher, her breathless and occasionally overwrought prose is full of anachronisms (Penélope Cruz makes an appearance) and cliché (“Times were changing”). One writer who threatened to reveal the truth about Earp’s other women, she writes, “was loading a shotgun and pointing it at Josephine’s heart.” But perhaps that sort of hyperbole suits the character of the Old West.

Kirschner casts her book as a personal journey to what she calls Planet Earp, and this will be problematic for many readers: few beyond “the community of Earp writers and historians” will be interested in the many pages detailing destroyed manuscripts, the bibliographic history of this or that Earp book or the controversies, tedious double-dealings and conspiracy theories concocted by professional and amateur Earp nuts, then and now.

Kirschner says she “fell in love” with Josephine Marcus, and in these pages she attempts to rehabilitate her subject “as an artist of adventure who emerged from one cocoon as an immigrant Polish Jew to mine the dynamic energy of the frontier.” I don’t think readers will fall as deeply in love with this curiously cold woman, whose inner life fails to leap off the page. But inner lives are hard to convey. At least, in “Lady at the O.K. Corral,” Kirschner has allowed Josephine Marcus finally to take her place in the long line of pioneers.

LADY AT THE O.K. CORRAL

The True Story of Josephine Marcus Earp

By Ann Kirschner

Illustrated. 289 pp. Harper. $27.99.

Sara Wheeler’s latest book, “O My America!: Six Women and Their Second Acts in a New World,” will be published in September.